What parts of "automatic installation of applications" requires iOS-like DRM?
The part where Steve likes to control everything.
That's not a part of "automatic installation of applications". With some of the hyperbole shaved off (i.e., with "likes to control everything" modified to cover only the stuff that is controlled in iOSland), that's a part of "an App Store exactly like the iDevice App Store"; it's not yet been indicated what review process (if any) will be used for the Mac App Store. (And, as El Jobso said in the damn talk, the Mac App Store won't be the only place to get apps; he did not say "until Lion comes out, at which point all your apps are belong to us!" That doesn't 100% rule out Lion working that way, but it doesn't 100% rule it in, either.)
Maybe it's because the design conventions of Mac OS X is to self-contain all your dependancies, so that you don't end up with the exact opposite problem: DLL hell.
Just out of curiosity, to what extent does "DLL hell" - or, perhaps, ".so hell" - occur on Linux distributions? How often does downloading package X cause updated versions of packages Y and Z to be downloaded, with package W now failing to work because the version you have installed also uses either or both of packages Y and Z and won't work with the updated versions?
"DLL hell" might be a common term on Windows, but the "dependency management and checking" was used in reference to Linux repositories, and if that's not a problem on the Linux distributions using those repositories, perhaps "{shared library} hell" is a consequence of the way things are done on Windows rather than with having libraries updated as necessary for newly-installed applications.
No, Apple does a much better job on experience. What's the MS App store look like?
Apple is copying Linux/Unix
More precisely, if you view the Mac App Store as a copy of those repositories, they're copying Linux/*BSD; do any of the commercial UNIXes have those sorts of repositories?
if the app you want to use is rejected, the developer would offer it via some other channel, if they can
What makes you think that "they can" will remain true for as long as Apple continues to exist?
What makes you think I think that? El Jobso said the current App Store won't be the only way to get apps (and, just to clarify, what I meant by "they can" in this context was "they can afford to get the app hosted themselves, and, if they're selling it rather than giving it away, handle the credit-card payments" - i.e., if they can get the services that the App Store would provide in some other way; I suspect the main intent of the App Store is to make it easier for small developers to sell their apps, although whether it succeeds at that is another matter).
Perhaps, in the future, OS X will be set up so that you can never ever ever ever ever run unsigned apps on it and the only place to get signed apps will be from Apple or from its App Store, but, if you're going to talk about the future, to be accurate you'd need to say something such as "in the future, if the app you want to use is rejected, you will have to become a member of the developer program to use it, even if you're not a developer" - that's not going to be the case until, at the earliest, Lion (and I wouldn't expect Lion to impose that limitation).
OK, I missed that part of the talk - what's "instant on" about it?
Non upgradable.
As in "the internal secondary storage is soldered to the motherboard rather than being in a removable hard drive or SSD"?
More unibody-ier.
"More unibody-ier" than, say, a current MacBook or MacBook Pro?
Higher res display like the iPad.
What makes it "like the iPad"?
More marketing than actual hybridization, but that's normal marketing.
OK, I should go back and see the part of the talk where they used the word "hybrid" (I'm assuming that's there, otherwise, it's not even marketing, it's just somebody not at Apple calling it a hybrid).
I'm not saying that they require the app store now, but what about in 2 years time? I'm a big fan of apple cases, iMac excluded, but it's just not worth the lockdown. How long until the hardware will only run signed OS's on bare metal, and the only way to run windows is some sort of VM. if you get to at all?
Somewhere between 1 year and 5 billion years, probably (assuming Apple doesn't somehow survive Sol turning into a red giant). That's all we know right now; all else is speculation.
I'll give you VMWare, but my exchange with Intuit when I couldn't eFile my state return this year went like this:
"Sorry, there's a bug in the mac application that prevents the eFile working in California.
No, we won't be fixing it".
Well, there's "fly-by-night" in the sense of "might just be malware" and there's "fly-by-night" in the sense of "our support sucks"; I think the person to whom I was replying was referring to the former.
What's a "full 64-bit GUI"? Do you mean "what about bringing 64-bit Carbon back from the dead"? If not, what's not "full 64-bit" about the Snow Leopard GUI, say?
The point is not to make it impossible, the point is to make it inconvenient to the point that the majority of their user-base does it the apple way.
If the Mac App Store is sufficiently convenient and includes all apps that the majority of the user base would use, then they might not have to make it inconvenient to get apps from elsewhere - people might just use the Mac App Store by default.
2013: Mac OS X 10.9 no longer runs unsigned code. For that, you need to buy Mac OS X Professional, or the developer SDK and a signing key.
and
The Mac is now locked up the same way as the iPhone or iPad.
So where can I buy iOS Professional? For Mac OS X to be locked up the same way as iOS, there would have to be no OS from Apple, running on iOS devices, that lets you run unsigned code without the developer SDK and a signing key. Requiring Mac OS X Professional for that isn't as bad if you can run OS X Professional on any machine that can run OS X End-User - if OS X Professional is available to all, the pain would be 1) financial, if OS X Professional is more expensive and 2) time and convenience, if you have to install OS X Professional on top of OS X End-User on machines that ship with the latter.
(And, yes, I think it'd be cool if Apple offered, for iOS, a switch you could flip to allow running non-App Store approved code, even if doing so also flips the "your machine is under warranty" switch to "off".)
AFAIK that's been there since the very earliest releases of OS X. The Mac App Store seems to be more or less an upgrade to this webpage.
The terms for the "Downloads" page require the developer to host the product, and I don't know if any applications that are licensed as "you have to pay money before you can use this app" rather than, say, free or shareware or demoware. An Apple-hosted App Store is more than a bit of an upgrade.
If the app you want to use is rejected, you have to become a member of the developer program to use it, even if you're not a developer.
If we're talking about Mac OS X apps, if the app you want to use is rejected, the developer would offer it via some other channel, if they can, in which case you wouldn't have to become a member of the developer program to use it.
Between those two? Unification. The closer they get the less reason there is to maintain separate OSes.
The second of those trends is picking up some UI ideas from one of the OSes and adapting it to the other. That's very far from merging the two OSes.
You call this paranoia,
Perhaps somebody called it paranoia, but I didn't. I call it "speculation", just as saying that Apple won't lock down Mac OS X is "speculation". (I'm also tempted to call both of them "Kremlinology", as much of the problem is that Apple is a very opaque organization, and people trying to infer what Apple will do based on "what I'd do if I were Steve" extrapolations from everything Apple does remind me of people trying to infer things about what's going on inside the government of the USSR and the Soviet Communist Party based on who appeared on the podium on May Day.)
I call what you do wishful thinking.
Asking somebody to back up their statements is "wishful thinking"? That's a definition of "wishful thinking" with which I was not previously acquainted.
You insist they won't do it
Perhaps somebody insisted that Apple wouldn't lock down Mac OS X, but I didn't. I also didn't insist that they would; I don't know what they're thinking of doing, much less what they will do ("what they're thinking of doing" doesn't necessarily turn into "what they will do").
Maybe I missed the point where they said that existing iOS apps won't run on OS X
We all probably missed the point where they said that existing iOS apps would run on OS X, and that was because they didn't say that. For the reasons I gave, it's not as if they'll magically Just Work.
Size is one thing, I don't see you downloading the WoW installation DVD from there for instance, and many games nowadays are quite large. Something along the lines of MS Office is also too large for the same reason. The download model works best with small files and low cost items.
How "large" is large? I bought Quicken 2007 online and downloaded it; the dmg for it is about 22MB.
And what does the price have to do with it?
Second is if I'm paying lots of money for a fat app I want a physical disk and a physical manual.
Which means you might not buy software in downloadable form; others don't necessarily share your preferences. (I definitely don't - I prefer bits in this case.)
but with all the news of bit rot on consumer-level CD's and DVD's I'm concerned that my disks won't be usable several years into the future.
Your hard disks, on which a downloaded software package might be stored, or the CDs and DVDs on which non-downloaded software was delivered? If CD's and DVD's bit-rot, you're going to want a backup copy of your media in any case (unless the software seller can keep track of whether you've already bought something, and keeps around older versions that people might have bought, and lets you re-download)?
Yes, it is quite burdensome and a big disadvantage: buy through the app store and get virus-checked, tracked, auto-updating applications, or download some software from some website and take your life into your own hands.
Yeah, those "VMware" and "Intuit" guys are pretty fly-by-night; I guess I should've waited for the App Store before picking up their apps online.
How many dependencies between downloadable components do OS X apps have?
Few, because OS X simply has no way of dealing with them. That's a bad thing. And it's going to continue to be a bad thing
Because it's technically impossible for, say, the OS X packaging and installation mechanism to support dependencies, or replaced with a mechanism that can?
Because extrapolating from existing trends isn't paranoia. Not trusting market driven statements (of course we aren't making an iPhone 4 don't put off your iPhone purchase because of these silly rumors) isn't paranoia.
One the trend is locked down devices with iOS.Another is moving OS X in the direction of those devices UI wise.
I'm interested in seeing some of the apps on the Mac -- there are quite a few that do one very useful job very well. So I welcome the chance to use these under OS X.
iOS's GUI APIs are not the same as Mac OS X's GUI APIs; you'll have to wait for iOS apps to be ported to Mac OS X first, or wait for a version of Mac OS X that supports those APIs. (You'd also have to wait for them to be recompiled or for a Rosetta-like binary-to-binary translator or an ARM emulator or a Mac with an extra ARM processor.)
I don't even see how you could think that traditional apps could be delivered via an App Store-like interface,or that traditional software on the Mac will be uprooted for the App Store.
They just released the hybrid device (MacBook Air)
What's "hybrid" about it? (No, you can't cite any Lion features as evidence that it's a "hybrid" device; as El Jobso said, you can buy it now, and Lion isn't available now, so it'll ship with Snow Leopard.)
Linux repositories are a general purpose mechanism; you can point at any "app store" you like with them. Furthermore, they do extensive dependency management and checking.
Apple's App Store gives you one source of applications
To be precise, it gives you one source of applications for whatever mechanism the App Store uses; nothing requires that you get all your apps from there, but you might have to go through the hideously burdensome process of clicking a few links in your browser, maybe typing in your credit card number, and answering a few questions from the installer or dragging an app bundle to/Applications to buy and install an app from the vendor.
and it doesn't seem to do much in the way of dependency management.
How many dependencies between downloadable components do OS X apps have? Linux repositories (and BSD ports/packages collections) have lots of libraries in them, and apps (and other libraries) might depend on them, so dependency checking is useful there. OS X apps, for better or worse, tend to be self-contained - either they only use libraries and frameworks that come with the OS, or they bring along the other libraries and frameworks for the ride.
Well, Snow Leopard doesn't support PowerPC machines, so there's no point in having the app support PPC, but it does support 32-bit processors, so you could have a two-way fat app with x86 and x86-64 slices.
One of the simplest ways of demonstrating MacOS X is not UNIX is executing $ touch FOO foo and then doing a directory listing.
$ ls FOO foo $ sw_vers ProductName: Mac OS X Server ProductVersion: 10.5.5 BuildVersion: 9F33
So, if you see two files, it's not UNIX?
(Hint: HFSX can be case-sensitive.)
Yes, the default local file system in OS X is case-insensitive. In practice, that does get in my way on some rare occasions (e.g., when the CVS/SVN/Git repository for a project on which I'm working happens to have two files whose names differ only in case, or when I'm checking out a *BSD CVS repository and it hits the directory with the source for CVS), but I've managed to work around that (or, in the first case, fixing it - the projects in question either directly support Windows or have ports to Windows, so they shouldn't have files whose names differ only in case).
If it matters, you can get case-sensitive file systems, but some native apps, unfortunately, assume case-insensitivity.
Slashdot Mirror
What parts of "automatic installation of applications" requires iOS-like DRM?
The part where Steve likes to control everything.
That's not a part of "automatic installation of applications". With some of the hyperbole shaved off (i.e., with "likes to control everything" modified to cover only the stuff that is controlled in iOSland), that's a part of "an App Store exactly like the iDevice App Store"; it's not yet been indicated what review process (if any) will be used for the Mac App Store. (And, as El Jobso said in the damn talk, the Mac App Store won't be the only place to get apps; he did not say "until Lion comes out, at which point all your apps are belong to us!" That doesn't 100% rule out Lion working that way, but it doesn't 100% rule it in, either.)
i386 is dying
Yeah, damn Apple for dropping the Core Solo and Core Duo machines, and forcing their customers to get machines with x86-64 processors. :-)
Maybe it's because the design conventions of Mac OS X is to self-contain all your dependancies, so that you don't end up with the exact opposite problem: DLL hell.
Just out of curiosity, to what extent does "DLL hell" - or, perhaps, ".so hell" - occur on Linux distributions? How often does downloading package X cause updated versions of packages Y and Z to be downloaded, with package W now failing to work because the version you have installed also uses either or both of packages Y and Z and won't work with the updated versions?
"DLL hell" might be a common term on Windows, but the "dependency management and checking" was used in reference to Linux repositories, and if that's not a problem on the Linux distributions using those repositories, perhaps "{shared library} hell" is a consequence of the way things are done on Windows rather than with having libraries updated as necessary for newly-installed applications.
The paranoia here is all based on the iPad and the fact that Steve has declared that "the PC is over".
Did he ever say "the PC is over", in exactly those words, or did he, instead, say "We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it's uncomfortable," and "PCs are going to be like trucks. They are still going to be around." but that only "one out of x people will need them." The two are inequivalent.
No, Apple does a much better job on experience. What's the MS App store look like?
Apple is copying Linux/Unix
More precisely, if you view the Mac App Store as a copy of those repositories, they're copying Linux/*BSD; do any of the commercial UNIXes have those sorts of repositories?
if the app you want to use is rejected, the developer would offer it via some other channel, if they can
What makes you think that "they can" will remain true for as long as Apple continues to exist?
What makes you think I think that? El Jobso said the current App Store won't be the only way to get apps (and, just to clarify, what I meant by "they can" in this context was "they can afford to get the app hosted themselves, and, if they're selling it rather than giving it away, handle the credit-card payments" - i.e., if they can get the services that the App Store would provide in some other way; I suspect the main intent of the App Store is to make it easier for small developers to sell their apps, although whether it succeeds at that is another matter).
Perhaps, in the future, OS X will be set up so that you can never ever ever ever ever run unsigned apps on it and the only place to get signed apps will be from Apple or from its App Store, but, if you're going to talk about the future, to be accurate you'd need to say something such as "in the future, if the app you want to use is rejected, you will have to become a member of the developer program to use it, even if you're not a developer" - that's not going to be the case until, at the earliest, Lion (and I wouldn't expect Lion to impose that limitation).
Instant on.
OK, I missed that part of the talk - what's "instant on" about it?
Non upgradable.
As in "the internal secondary storage is soldered to the motherboard rather than being in a removable hard drive or SSD"?
More unibody-ier.
"More unibody-ier" than, say, a current MacBook or MacBook Pro?
Higher res display like the iPad.
What makes it "like the iPad"?
More marketing than actual hybridization, but that's normal marketing.
OK, I should go back and see the part of the talk where they used the word "hybrid" (I'm assuming that's there, otherwise, it's not even marketing, it's just somebody not at Apple calling it a hybrid).
There has been talk that Lion may not support 32-bit CPUs anymore, which will force a discontinuation of support for the earliest Intel Macs.
But the App Store will first support Snow Leopard, so there'll still be room for fat apps.
Fart apps, however....
I'm not saying that they require the app store now, but what about in 2 years time? I'm a big fan of apple cases, iMac excluded, but it's just not worth the lockdown. How long until the hardware will only run signed OS's on bare metal, and the only way to run windows is some sort of VM. if you get to at all?
Somewhere between 1 year and 5 billion years, probably (assuming Apple doesn't somehow survive Sol turning into a red giant). That's all we know right now; all else is speculation.
I'll give you VMWare, but my exchange with Intuit when I couldn't eFile my state return this year went like this:
"Sorry, there's a bug in the mac application that prevents the eFile working in California.
No, we won't be fixing it".
Well, there's "fly-by-night" in the sense of "might just be malware" and there's "fly-by-night" in the sense of "our support sucks"; I think the person to whom I was replying was referring to the former.
No other details on 10.7 ?
What about full 64-bit GUI?
What's a "full 64-bit GUI"? Do you mean "what about bringing 64-bit Carbon back from the dead"? If not, what's not "full 64-bit" about the Snow Leopard GUI, say?
It has the App Store.
So will Snow Leopard. (Yes, El Jobso said that the App Store would be available before Lion came out.)
How are they going to provide an iPad like app store without iPad like DRM?
How is anybody able to sell apps for Mac OS X without iOS-like DRM? What parts of "automatic installation of applications" requires iOS-like DRM?
The point is not to make it impossible, the point is to make it inconvenient to the point that the majority of their user-base does it the apple way.
If the Mac App Store is sufficiently convenient and includes all apps that the majority of the user base would use, then they might not have to make it inconvenient to get apps from elsewhere - people might just use the Mac App Store by default.
Yup, I predicted this is how it would go down too.
Said page says
2013: Mac OS X 10.9 no longer runs unsigned code. For that, you need to buy Mac OS X Professional, or the developer SDK and a signing key.
and
The Mac is now locked up the same way as the iPhone or iPad.
So where can I buy iOS Professional? For Mac OS X to be locked up the same way as iOS, there would have to be no OS from Apple, running on iOS devices, that lets you run unsigned code without the developer SDK and a signing key. Requiring Mac OS X Professional for that isn't as bad if you can run OS X Professional on any machine that can run OS X End-User - if OS X Professional is available to all, the pain would be 1) financial, if OS X Professional is more expensive and 2) time and convenience, if you have to install OS X Professional on top of OS X End-User on machines that ship with the latter.
(And, yes, I think it'd be cool if Apple offered, for iOS, a switch you could flip to allow running non-App Store approved code, even if doing so also flips the "your machine is under warranty" switch to "off".)
Apple does too: go to the "Apple Menu > Mac OS X Software..." which takes you to http://www.apple.com/downloads/
AFAIK that's been there since the very earliest releases of OS X. The Mac App Store seems to be more or less an upgrade to this webpage.
The terms for the "Downloads" page require the developer to host the product, and I don't know if any applications that are licensed as "you have to pay money before you can use this app" rather than, say, free or shareware or demoware. An Apple-hosted App Store is more than a bit of an upgrade.
If the app you want to use is rejected, you have to become a member of the developer program to use it, even if you're not a developer.
If we're talking about Mac OS X apps, if the app you want to use is rejected, the developer would offer it via some other channel, if they can, in which case you wouldn't have to become a member of the developer program to use it.
Between those two? Unification. The closer they get the less reason there is to maintain separate OSes.
The second of those trends is picking up some UI ideas from one of the OSes and adapting it to the other. That's very far from merging the two OSes.
You call this paranoia,
Perhaps somebody called it paranoia, but I didn't. I call it "speculation", just as saying that Apple won't lock down Mac OS X is "speculation". (I'm also tempted to call both of them "Kremlinology", as much of the problem is that Apple is a very opaque organization, and people trying to infer what Apple will do based on "what I'd do if I were Steve" extrapolations from everything Apple does remind me of people trying to infer things about what's going on inside the government of the USSR and the Soviet Communist Party based on who appeared on the podium on May Day.)
I call what you do wishful thinking.
Asking somebody to back up their statements is "wishful thinking"? That's a definition of "wishful thinking" with which I was not previously acquainted.
You insist they won't do it
Perhaps somebody insisted that Apple wouldn't lock down Mac OS X, but I didn't. I also didn't insist that they would; I don't know what they're thinking of doing, much less what they will do ("what they're thinking of doing" doesn't necessarily turn into "what they will do").
Maybe I missed the point where they said that existing iOS apps won't run on OS X
We all probably missed the point where they said that existing iOS apps would run on OS X, and that was because they didn't say that. For the reasons I gave, it's not as if they'll magically Just Work.
Size is one thing, I don't see you downloading the WoW installation DVD from there for instance, and many games nowadays are quite large. Something along the lines of MS Office is also too large for the same reason. The download model works best with small files and low cost items.
How "large" is large? I bought Quicken 2007 online and downloaded it; the dmg for it is about 22MB.
And what does the price have to do with it?
Second is if I'm paying lots of money for a fat app I want a physical disk and a physical manual.
Which means you might not buy software in downloadable form; others don't necessarily share your preferences. (I definitely don't - I prefer bits in this case.)
but with all the news of bit rot on consumer-level CD's and DVD's I'm concerned that my disks won't be usable several years into the future.
Your hard disks, on which a downloaded software package might be stored, or the CDs and DVDs on which non-downloaded software was delivered? If CD's and DVD's bit-rot, you're going to want a backup copy of your media in any case (unless the software seller can keep track of whether you've already bought something, and keeps around older versions that people might have bought, and lets you re-download)?
Yes, it is quite burdensome and a big disadvantage: buy through the app store and get virus-checked, tracked, auto-updating applications, or download some software from some website and take your life into your own hands.
Yeah, those "VMware" and "Intuit" guys are pretty fly-by-night; I guess I should've waited for the App Store before picking up their apps online.
How many dependencies between downloadable components do OS X apps have?
Few, because OS X simply has no way of dealing with them. That's a bad thing. And it's going to continue to be a bad thing
Because it's technically impossible for, say, the OS X packaging and installation mechanism to support dependencies, or replaced with a mechanism that can?
Because extrapolating from existing trends isn't paranoia. Not trusting market driven statements (of course we aren't making an iPhone 4 don't put off your iPhone purchase because of these silly rumors) isn't paranoia.
One the trend is locked down devices with iOS.Another is moving OS X in the direction of those devices UI wise.
And the connection between those two trends is?
I'm interested in seeing some of the apps on the Mac -- there are quite a few that do one very useful job very well. So I welcome the chance to use these under OS X.
iOS's GUI APIs are not the same as Mac OS X's GUI APIs; you'll have to wait for iOS apps to be ported to Mac OS X first, or wait for a version of Mac OS X that supports those APIs. (You'd also have to wait for them to be recompiled or for a Rosetta-like binary-to-binary translator or an ARM emulator or a Mac with an extra ARM processor.)
I don't even see how you could think that traditional apps could be delivered via an App Store-like interface ,or that traditional software on the Mac will be uprooted for the App Store.
Why not? What about an App Store-like interface would prevent existing apps from being sold there?
They just released the hybrid device (MacBook Air)
What's "hybrid" about it? (No, you can't cite any Lion features as evidence that it's a "hybrid" device; as El Jobso said, you can buy it now, and Lion isn't available now, so it'll ship with Snow Leopard.)
Linux repositories are a general purpose mechanism; you can point at any "app store" you like with them. Furthermore, they do extensive dependency management and checking.
Apple's App Store gives you one source of applications
To be precise, it gives you one source of applications for whatever mechanism the App Store uses; nothing requires that you get all your apps from there, but you might have to go through the hideously burdensome process of clicking a few links in your browser, maybe typing in your credit card number, and answering a few questions from the installer or dragging an app bundle to /Applications to buy and install an app from the vendor.
and it doesn't seem to do much in the way of dependency management.
How many dependencies between downloadable components do OS X apps have? Linux repositories (and BSD ports/packages collections) have lots of libraries in them, and apps (and other libraries) might depend on them, so dependency checking is useful there. OS X apps, for better or worse, tend to be self-contained - either they only use libraries and frameworks that come with the OS, or they bring along the other libraries and frameworks for the ride.
No fat app?
Well, Snow Leopard doesn't support PowerPC machines, so there's no point in having the app support PPC, but it does support 32-bit processors, so you could have a two-way fat app with x86 and x86-64 slices.
One of the simplest ways of demonstrating MacOS X is not UNIX is executing $ touch FOO foo and then doing a directory listing.
So, if you see two files, it's not UNIX?
(Hint: HFSX can be case-sensitive.)
Yes, the default local file system in OS X is case-insensitive. In practice, that does get in my way on some rare occasions (e.g., when the CVS/SVN/Git repository for a project on which I'm working happens to have two files whose names differ only in case, or when I'm checking out a *BSD CVS repository and it hits the directory with the source for CVS), but I've managed to work around that (or, in the first case, fixing it - the projects in question either directly support Windows or have ports to Windows, so they shouldn't have files whose names differ only in case).
If it matters, you can get case-sensitive file systems, but some native apps, unfortunately, assume case-insensitivity.